By Mayank Chhaya Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has emerged triumphant from the firestorm of nuclear politics and in the process discovered a true politician in himself. Let no one any longer dismiss Singh as a brilliant but staid policy wonk/ bureaucrat who was pushed into India’s highest and most politicized office by a quirk of fate. He is now perhaps India’s most battle-tested politician, having first unleashed defining economic reform in the early 1990s amid a climate of intense political acrimony, and now firmly planting India into the nuclear club in the face a potentially terminal challenge to not just his government but his own political future. The common underlying theme in both his adventures has been his unshakable conviction about the righteousness of his cause and a rarely recognized ability to turn that into a valuable political asset.